Forget the meta battles, what this site lacks is a sufficient text-based technical knowledge, which leads to highly-praised second-rate answers and the paralysing inability to auto-critique. Mind you, even the penny wise dilettante can't help but be pound foolish, and this is likely the very reason you can't find a middle ground. Were there well-substantiated answers that drew from the breadth of available literature and had themselves merit in their depth of understanding, wheat would be distinguishable from chaff by self-evident demands of rigor. In the absence of anything closely resembling that, it's no wonder there's more fumbling in the dark than much else.